Author
Topic: ah!!! I have a virus! (Read 1026 times)

aaaa! I feel like my house is on fire or something! the thing is, my security popped up and told me my PC's strongly infected with several viruses. I didn't mind this, as I have a thing called "splashtop", which is a pretty cool thing. I can be on the net without logging onto windows, so it doesn't affect me. BUT, I do have hotmail e-mail installed on my computer. I cannot log into windows (the virus prevents me) so I just e-mail from the internet. but lately, there have been two e-mails gone out from my account that I DID NOT sent. they both had links. one was for male enhancement, and the other was a Russian website sending out viruses! and they have very legit. subject lines, too. the virus' said "hey". so, I went into hotmail and deleted my contacts. I NEED THIS TO STOP.

you see, I was struggling with a =n addiction on pornography, but I've stopped looking these past 2 months. looks like it's finally come to bite me in the butt.

so, should I delete my hotmail account and use another e-mail, sigh as g-mail or AOL? would that help at all?

(the worst part is, my mother cannot afford to have my computer fixed right now. this is fine, as I can still go on the net like this, but this wierd thing with e-mail has to stop.)

I appreciate your help, as I'm in one of those "the house is on fire!" moods.

That should hopefully solve the problem of sending unauthorised emails.

If you have access to a computer with a burner, you could attempt to purge the viruses/trojans yourself by making a disc that scans at boot.

« Last Edit: November 18, 2010, 11:16:04 AM by Entscheidungsproblem »

Logged

As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future.-- Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS

Sounds like you don't need access to any of your currently installed files anyway...the easy solution to your problem is simply to reinstall the operating system. Attempts to actually remove the virus would be a substantial undertaking (viruses are much more advanced than they were just five years ago or so) that requires a pretty in depth knowledge of windows registries, your web browser's interaction with the operating system, and windows start up procedures. If you do choose this option, it will probably have to be performed in safe mode as (well written) modern viruses integrate themselves into core windows systems and are almost impossible to remove in a normal start-up. A CD should have come with your computer to do just that (or at least 'Restore' the operating system to factory defaults). If you don't have that, you can always download a copy via bittorrent...perhaps not technically 'legal', but who cares. Or better yet, you can do what I've done and download Linux (Ubuntu installs easy), it's free and perfectly legal to download (not that being legal to download makes it better...but so many other things do, that's just icing on the cake). If you can't find a computer to download Ubuntu from and burn it to CD, they will send you one for free (but it takes 4-10 weeks), by copyright law they only have to offer the operating system as a free download and are free to sell it and charge shipping when mailed to you on a CD (provided they offer free downloads), but despite my occasional complaints about what Ubuntu does under the hood, Canonical is a good company, they do their best to make the operating system freely and easily available to anyone who wants it. If you need to request a free CD, you can start here, they'll ask for a description of the reason you can't download it, but if you have a legit reason, they'll send you a CD:

Alternatively, you could buy a Ubuntu/Kubuntu (Kubuntu is the same operating system, just with a different graphical user interface) bundle for a 4 quid (a little over six dollar) donation and have it shipped much faster. Last I checked, the money goes to helping send out free CD's to other people who can't download the operating system.

If you reinstall your operating system using any option other than the CD shipped with the computer and have a laptop, you may sometimes (but not always, depends on the computer) have to find some drivers after the install, regardless of whether your choose Windows or Linux; most functions will work just fine but there may be issues with things like sound, webcams, and ports.

Logged

"The liberties of people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them." -- Patrick Henry

I don't know what's more nerdy, that you put it up or that I immediately recognized the emblem...it's not often that a video game portrays a faction with values I believe in.

! I was so upset when I found out you couldn't become a member of the Brotherhood Outcasts in Fallout 3. They were so much better than the "real" Brotherhood.

"Always remember the fires that we were forged in. Those who forget are lost."

Thankfully, the Brotherhood is more how it should be in New Vegas.

Logged

As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future.-- Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS

Sounds like you don't need access to any of your currently installed files anyway...the easy solution to your problem is simply to reinstall the operating system. Attempts to actually remove the virus would be a substantial undertaking (viruses are much more advanced than they were just five years ago or so) that requires a pretty in depth knowledge of windows registries, your web browser's interaction with the operating system, and windows start up procedures. If you do choose this option, it will probably have to be performed in safe mode as (well written) modern viruses integrate themselves into core windows systems and are almost impossible to remove in a normal start-up. A CD should have come with your computer to do just that (or at least 'Restore' the operating system to factory defaults). If you don't have that, you can always download a copy via bittorrent...perhaps not technically 'legal', but who cares. Or better yet, you can do what I've done and download Linux (Ubuntu installs easy), it's free and perfectly legal to download (not that being legal to download makes it better...but so many other things do, that's just icing on the cake). If you can't find a computer to download Ubuntu from and burn it to CD, they will send you one for free (but it takes 4-10 weeks), by copyright law they only have to offer the operating system as a free download and are free to sell it and charge shipping when mailed to you on a CD (provided they offer free downloads), but despite my occasional complaints about what Ubuntu does under the hood, Canonical is a good company, they do their best to make the operating system freely and easily available to anyone who wants it. If you need to request a free CD, you can start here, they'll ask for a description of the reason you can't download it, but if you have a legit reason, they'll send you a CD:

Alternatively, you could buy a Ubuntu/Kubuntu (Kubuntu is the same operating system, just with a different graphical user interface) bundle for a 4 quid (a little over six dollar) donation and have it shipped much faster. Last I checked, the money goes to helping send out free CD's to other people who can't download the operating system.

If you reinstall your operating system using any option other than the CD shipped with the computer and have a laptop, you may sometimes (but not always, depends on the computer) have to find some drivers after the install, regardless of whether your choose Windows or Linux; most functions will work just fine but there may be issues with things like sound, webcams, and ports.

This is all good stuff Trevor. I'm not sure if GiC appreciates the leap in a unix for most folks though . . .

GiC,

I haven't installed Linux on a box in probably over a decade, is Ubuntu user-friendly that your "proverbial grandmother" could use it easily?

When Apple went to a BSD-based OS, I quit using Linux on my personal computers.

I haven't installed Linux on a box in probably over a decade, is Ubuntu user-friendly that your "proverbial grandmother" could use it easily?

If one has mastered turning on a computer, Ubuntu shouldn't be a problem for them. The hardest part is typically getting them used to using unfamiliar applications to perform standard tasks (firefox/chromium, evolution/thunderbird, pidgin/aMSN/emesene, openOffice, VLC/totem/mplayer, etc).

My mother used to be about as computer-illiterate as they came, and she converted from Windows to Ubuntu quite easily.

There is always Linux Mint too.

« Last Edit: November 18, 2010, 03:52:22 PM by Entscheidungsproblem »

Logged

As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future.-- Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS

I just installed Fedora 14 on a laptop used by my sister's friend. I created shortcuts for Firefox and cheese (webcam software); otherwise, I hope she jumps in and uses Fedora like she used Windows Vista. I intend to show her the bare minimum steps needed to keep Fedora happy (e.g., updates, using her account, using applications like OpenOffice, etc.)

Her laptop was corrupted due to numerous disk cylinder errors caused by Vista's frequent crashing due to a power button issue. I never experienced such instability when using Fedora.

As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future.-- Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS

I will do this. you see, I don't mind the virus. I could never get it off, and I wouldn't care. my computer still works. it's that whole e-mail thing that's terrible! thanks so much for this.

No problem. If you don't use any specialty software and don't really play video games, I'd definitely look into a simple Linux distribution (like Ubuntu).

Logged

As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future.-- Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS

Sounds like you don't need access to any of your currently installed files anyway...the easy solution to your problem is simply to reinstall the operating system. Attempts to actually remove the virus would be a substantial undertaking (viruses are much more advanced than they were just five years ago or so) that requires a pretty in depth knowledge of windows registries, your web browser's interaction with the operating system, and windows start up procedures. If you do choose this option, it will probably have to be performed in safe mode as (well written) modern viruses integrate themselves into core windows systems and are almost impossible to remove in a normal start-up. A CD should have come with your computer to do just that (or at least 'Restore' the operating system to factory defaults). If you don't have that, you can always download a copy via bittorrent...perhaps not technically 'legal', but who cares. Or better yet, you can do what I've done and download Linux (Ubuntu installs easy), it's free and perfectly legal to download (not that being legal to download makes it better...but so many other things do, that's just icing on the cake). If you can't find a computer to download Ubuntu from and burn it to CD, they will send you one for free (but it takes 4-10 weeks), by copyright law they only have to offer the operating system as a free download and are free to sell it and charge shipping when mailed to you on a CD (provided they offer free downloads), but despite my occasional complaints about what Ubuntu does under the hood, Canonical is a good company, they do their best to make the operating system freely and easily available to anyone who wants it. If you need to request a free CD, you can start here, they'll ask for a description of the reason you can't download it, but if you have a legit reason, they'll send you a CD:

Alternatively, you could buy a Ubuntu/Kubuntu (Kubuntu is the same operating system, just with a different graphical user interface) bundle for a 4 quid (a little over six dollar) donation and have it shipped much faster. Last I checked, the money goes to helping send out free CD's to other people who can't download the operating system.

If you reinstall your operating system using any option other than the CD shipped with the computer and have a laptop, you may sometimes (but not always, depends on the computer) have to find some drivers after the install, regardless of whether your choose Windows or Linux; most functions will work just fine but there may be issues with things like sound, webcams, and ports.

This is all good stuff Trevor. I'm not sure if GiC appreciates the leap in a unix for most folks though . . .

GiC,

I haven't installed Linux on a box in probably over a decade, is Ubuntu user-friendly that your "proverbial grandmother" could use it easily?

When Apple went to a BSD-based OS, I quit using Linux on my personal computers.

I could walk my 'proverbial grandmother' through an installation of the operating system over the phone; though as I said before, a few things might not work right if you have a laptop, especially a newer one...if you have a desktop I doubt there'll be any problems. Personal problems I had with my laptop, which I bought at Best Buy, took straight home, and immediately formatted all hard drive partitions and installed Linux, were that while the sound worked, the head phone port wouldn't mute the sound and the webcam didn't work. There are fixes for both, but they were somewhat involved; in fact, Ubuntu 10.10 fixed the sound by itself (I had problems under 10.04), webcam will probably be fixed under the next update, Canonical places a high priority on ease of install and use, including making sure peripherals work.

Before coming back to Linux as my primary operating system about a year ago I had not used it on a regular basis (only for programming) since about 2003 when in college, Ubuntu 10.10 is not Slackware 8.0...which is what I had used back then. It virtually installs on it's own, you won't have problems like your mouse or usb ports not working, and you don't have to spend hours editing configuration files just to get basic operability; I remember the first time I installed Slackware on a laptop, the mouse pad didn't work, I spent hours playing with configuration files and downloading drivers (some of which were still incomplete) on the command line via Lynx just to get it working, this was after spending hours getting the GUI to work with the graphics card. I was in college at the time, so I really didn't mind, it was a good learning experience and at the end of the day I had a great operating system, vastly superior to Windows ME which was what MS's latest contribution at the time.

But Ubuntu's not like that, it's come a long ways in user experience; however, as a word of warning, if you use a different flavor of Linux, you might not like Ubuntu once you get it up and running, over the past year or two they've moved many of the configuration folders from their traditional locations, the default install doesn't even display configuration files but compiled binaries, you often have to create the config files from scratch to use them in some instances, in other instances you have to reconfigure the software or even download an update to be able to use a config file. The change from GRUB to GRUB 2 was especially bad.

But, to the average user, most of this will never make a difference and they'll appreciate being able make changes from GUI toolboxes under the preference menu; they may be more limited, but they are easy to use. As Entscheidungsproblem said, the biggest challenge is just getting used to the new software, but it's often better. There's no internet explorer, but Chrome runs nicely (firefox less so), unless you're willing to fork out the money for Adobe's Photoshop, it's hard to compete with GIMP, VLC is head and shoulders above Windows Media Player, and if you do anything more serious with your computer, comparing the programing and software development tools available in Linux with those in Windows is like comparing IBM's latest supercomputer to Microsoft's Kin phone. Maple and Matlab are both available for Linux if you use those programs, but the free Maxima will serve most people's needs.

The only windows software I miss is the Office Suite and that's only because I work with so many Excel spreadsheets that have macros in them, I can still run windows in a virtual box when I need to work on those spreadsheets, otherwise I just use Google Documents...haven't really seen the need for OpenOffice.

Deal breakers would be if you play a lot of games, almost all of which are released only for Windows (with a few making to to OSX), or if you use AutoCad on a very regular basis...but if you just do these things occasionally, there's no reason not to use VMWare and do it in a virtual box.

Logged

"The liberties of people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them." -- Patrick Henry